


Once Again

by Eat0crow



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Naruto, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Multi, Reincarnation, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-03-26
Packaged: 2019-04-08 07:07:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14100042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eat0crow/pseuds/Eat0crow
Summary: Loki could remember a boy with sun kissed skin and ocean blue eyes, he could remember this boy the same way he could remember a man, a man in a long black cloak with red clouds and eyes that bled red.When Pepper Potts looked into the mirror and really looked, not just glanced, she didn't see herself. No she saw a women who was strong, oh so strong, with pink hair and a red dress.Naruto Uzumaki. It's the name Steve Rogers knows seemingly before his own. It's a name that's always at the tip of his tongue. It's the name he never says.





	1. Chapter 1

Loki knows Thor isn’t his brother. He knows this in the same way he knows that Odin isn’t his father. In the sense of wrongness that comes and slithers down his spine, in hazy fractured memories of blood and broken bodies when he tries to think back, back to who his real parents are. Back to who his real brother is, to the man with blood red eyes and a broken smile on his face as he crumples to the ground.

Loki knows just as he knows he isn’t his father's favorite, not like that's any different, that time flows differently between the realms, he knows that a day on asgard can be a year on midgard. He knows that there are different dimensions. Different planes of existence and he knows he doesn’t belong here.

He’s not entirely sure where he belongs. Not asgard, not under Odin’s thumb. Not in Thor’s shadow. And why, why does it feel so nostalgic to be cast aside in favor of the elder child. The feelings come with the memories of corpses and the feeling of fear, oh god so much fear. So he doesn’t try to think too hard on where he belongs. When he is young, Loki tries to block out these feelings and these memories that really, really can’t be his.

It’s hard they are,after all, always there. In the back of his mind just hiding underneath the surface. They hide under an inky curtain. Under dark black oil spilt into a lake. Sometimes when the current is strong, when the wind is blowing, and the oil moving the water, pure and clean, it bleeds into Loki’s brain and he remembers.

Loki hates remembering. He can’t stand it. He wants it to stop! He’s not that little boy with raven hair just like his now and eyes, god those black terrified eyes staring out into a sea of red red red red red RED! Thor isn’t that man, the man with long black hairs and cold eyes that stare at him, that tell him to get stronger. That tell him to cling to his anger, to his hatred, to let it consume him. Thor is not that man and Loki will not listen to that man. So Loki never follows Thor when he does to hunt or to train. If invitations from Thor make Loki remember cold lifeless eyes and aweful murkey memories that are always just under the surface, well Loki will never be a warrior. 

Likewise Thor isn’t the man trains Loki when he has time or pokes his forehead with promises of laters that never come. He is in the sense that he does all these things. He drags Loki away from his books and his spells, he drags Loki out into the fields and the meadows,in between his own training and forces the basics of combat into Loki’s skull whether he likes it or not. He doesn’t poke Loki’s forehead. Thor has always been more direct, he clasps his shoulder and promises that later, later their going to do all manner of crazy insane thing that really they have no business doing. In a way Loki is thankful to Thor for all this efforts his, for his laters and training and smiles. Smiles that are nothing like that man’s smiles. 

Even if Thor makes him remember the man with the cold eyes in the long black cloak with red clouds and the boy who looks the same. Is the same he thinks. But is so different. Loki can handle it. It’s okay for a time and than...Than they grow older,Thor grows bolder and Loki can’t handle it anymore.

Loki can’t handle looking across the hall at his brother and seeing yet another man. This time a blond, with blue eyes like the sky and skin kissed by the sun. He’s bolder than Thor, just as loud, rougher. They don’t have the same sense of justice. For all that Thor is noble this boy, Loki first sees him as a boy, is loyal. For all that Thor’s life has been simple, admiration and respect handed to him, this boys wasn’t. Wasn’t in the memories of whispers Loki heard when he wasn’t Loki.

So Loki pulls away,he pulls away because it hurts to remember the blond. It hurts to remember someone he has never met and feel such longing for. Someone that Loki knows understood him, that would understand him, in a way that know one ever has. It hurts to touch the pool of memories, to shift the oil, to see the clear clean water, and feel that this boy was precious to him. It hurts to know that even through these small hazy fragments that Loki sees, the boy has managed to become precious to Loki once again. He hates it.

For a while when Thor is gone, mostly given up on getting Loki to stop avoiding him, and he is left alone, he’ll entertain thoughts of meeting him. For awhile he resents the boy with hair like sunshine and whiskers on his cheeks. He hates that the boy has broken down his walls without even trying. Hates that the memories that bubble to the surface featuring him are tinged with happiness. Loki really can’t stand it, and for a while Loki is convinced that if he ever meets the boy he will kill him. Stab him straight through the heart and rid himself of a nuisance.

Than he remembers that man with blood red eyes telling him to.Telling him to kill his best friend, telling him to give into his hatred and Loki remembers doing just that. For the first time he sees a memory clear as day and he wished, with all his heart, that he hadn’t. He wishes that he didn’t remember trying to kill his best friend, his teammate. They were comrades. He wishes he couldn’t feel the blood soaking his hand as he pushes right into a chest. Wishes that when he closes his eyes that he couldn’t see those blue blue blue eyes staring back at him with betrayal in the place where something warm had once been. 

Loki goes to see Thor. It’s been months. Loki is good at hiding from people when he doesn’t want to be found. Good at going unnoticed and slinking around. It helps that no one tries all that hard to find him. He knows. They all are just as happy to avoid him as he is to them. He’s reminded of a village, one he’s never been to, that treated him the same when he returned. Funny how you can have memories of returning to a place you’ve never been.

Like the boy with a fox grin Thor lets him in, he lets Loki back into his life like Loki never left and the nostalgia from that never fades. It never feels quite like it did with the boy. It never feels quite right.Loki knows that the boy is special to him, he knows that he cared about him, they cared for each other in tandem.Thor isn’t the boy with whiskered cheeks and sun kissed skin who holds his hand out to Loki with a smile and something, something warm,in his eyes. They are to different people and that’s okay, for all that they are alike they are different. Not in the way that Loki is different from the boy he remember being but isn’t, they are different in the way that two strangers are different. They aren’t the same people,they don’t have the same core.


	2. Chapter 2

 

When Pepper Potts looks in the mirror, really looks, passed all the hazy inky blotches that dot the far reaches of her mind and into the well of what she hasn’t done and people she’s never met she sees a women staring back at her. She has bright pink hair. It’s the womens natural color. Pepper can tell, her roots never show and even her eyebrows and  _ eyelashes _ are the same obnoxious shade. The women has emerald green eyes and milky skin. She looks asian. It’s in the tilt of her eyes and the slope of her nose. But that's not important. The women looks strong. 

 

Pepper wants to be as strong as the women who stares back at her from the mirror. Pepper wants the silent strength and lethal grace this woman carries herself with. She wants the air of self confidence that the women has wrapped around her like a cloak. For a minute and it is only a minute Pepper is outrageously envious of this mysterious person before she’s struck by the errant thought of how silly it is to be envious of oneself.

 

Well than. Pepper doesn’t have pink hair or emerald eyes and she could hardly call her skin milk. But it doesn’t matter because Pepper knows they are the same. They have the same core, the same essence. The same twinkling light behind their eyes. And Pepper’s okay with knowing that she was, is someone else. Wearing a different skin in a different time, she’s okay with looking so radically different than how she should look. How the women looks, because she knows she can be this women she can be a creature of lethal grace and silent confidence. All she needs to do is be strong.

 

It’s a thing easier said than done, especially when you’re a young girl who doesn’t quite understand what to and what not to tell adults. Her parents brush it off at first, they brush of each and every time a five year old Virginia Potts tells then that she wants to be like the women that is in her mirror. They think the women is an imaginary friend crafted by a child’s overactive imagination. They correct her and go about their busy lives. 

 

It’s not until Pepper is in kindergarten telling the other girls about her other self, the self that is strong, that she learns it’s better to keep somethings to herself. Other kinds call her weird. They call her a freak. They don’t believe her and what seems worse they don’t see anything similar. She’s an outlier, other kids, _ other people _ , don’t see different versions of themselves. They don’t have inky blotches and murkey curtains that exist just in the corner of their minds. 

 

The first day of Pepper’s kindergarten class is the last day she mentions the lady in the mirror. To her parents, to other children, to anyone.It’s validation for her parents.  People to busy to really spend time with her but to busy enough to not care. They rest assured the women in the mirror had only been a figment, something to keep a lonely child company. Something thrown away in the face of real socialization. 

 

The silence does not mean that Pepper has stopped seeing. As she gets older not only does she keep seeing the women in the mirror she starts feeling, and that is absolutely terrifying. It’s small ghost of emotions. Anger that both does and doesn’t feel like hers, nostalgia for things she has never done before. Familiarity within people she’s never meet before. She never sees anything different. It’s always the same women in the same pose. Eyes staring straight ahead looking right into her soul, into their soul.

 

Knowing that their souls are the same is more of a feeling than a concrete fact. But it’s enough of a feeling to keep Pepper from ever trying to shift the curtains in her memory. What was once easy facts to accept are now awful impossibilities.

 

Which is why, when it’s time to decide careers, she goes to study business. She does not go to medical school, she does not become a doctor and she most certainly does not give into the longing that comes when she glosses over the information for various medical programs all open and ripe for the picking.

 

Once upon a time she was a doctor. Once upon a time when she had pink hair and jeweled eyes she could heal as easily as she could breath. It’s a feeling so strong that it’s fact. She knows that she would be a good doctor, just like she knew that she could be strong. Pepper still wants to be strong, and she hopes that by choosing something for herself, by choosing the one career that doesn’t cause a shred of familiarity to enter her mind, that she is taking her first steps toward that. She hopes that she is being strong and not just running away.

 

Meeting Tony Stark is both the best and worst thing to ever happen to Pepper.He’s a dick, to put it simply, a grade A douche that can only be managed by becoming one of the guys and effectively not a potential lay . He’s a walking bag of problems, alcoholism and an ego easily the size of texas just being the tip of iceberg. He seems to like Pepper because she doesn’t take his shit.

 

She can’t bring herself to be one of the endless groupies that follow him around. Mostly because it feels familiar. It feels familiar to Pepper to throw herself at the feet of the nearest douchebag with a butt load of problems and the emotional intelligence of a piece of lettuce. Once upon a time, before Pepper was strong before she was Pepper, and while her hair was pink and her skin milky she believed that love could fix what was broken. She knows it can't now.

 

It was to hard for her to become strong, both then and now. There was no way in hell that she would throw it away. The thing about Tony though, is that he makes things blur together. He flawlessly moves the veil she has over her mind and with him comes all the things that have remained carefully hidden. He opens the curtains Pepper has never touched once and he does so by simply being. He does so by making her feel. She has seen and she has felt and together those two things have made her remember. 

 

She thinks that it says something about the kind of person she once was. That all she needs to know something, is to see and to feel. She remembers the kind of person she was, she knows what she looked like and if the nostalgia is anything to go by she has a vague outline of what she has done. 


End file.
